Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
from whence it can easily be accessed, surely all additional knowledge
in most sciences and, in particular, in medicine, should be beneficial for
mankind.
Some Views of the Future
Much of this topic is based around my own view of the future in a world
very much enriched by successes in Artificial Intelligence. Before closing
this chapter I would like to support my viewpoint by sharing with you
the views of three eminent futurists. The lucidity of their writing is a
pleasure to read and, most importantly, their opinions all support my
own!
Lawrence Summers
The following remarks were made by Lawrence Summers in 2002, in an
address given in his capacity as President of Harvard University.
From the perspective of a lay person who takes an interest in these
things, we really are alive at a remarkable moment. I spoke this
afternoon about how science is becoming interdisciplinary. It is
becoming collaborative. It is becoming holistic. And it is a property
of the exponential growth of knowledge that each year's increment
is greater than the last. And that is surely true.
Think about what we are on the brink of understanding over the
next three decades. We are on the brink of understanding the ge-
netic basis of disease and finding applications of that to disrupt dis-
ease processes. We are conceiving of materials, the likes of which
people could not have imagined, let alone created two decades ago,
that stop things that you want to stop, e.g., light; that move things
that you want to move, e.g., superconductors; that are strong in the
ways you want them to be strong; that are weak in the ways you
want them to be weak. We are doing that on an unprecedented
scale, and we are doing that based on a combination of practical
knowledge and a deep understanding of the constituents of matter.
We individuals sitting in offices armed with legal pads and Internet
connections are understanding what happened in the first millionth
of a second of the universe billions of years ago, and are now getting
more accurate understandings of the latter part of that millionth of
a second versus the earlier part of that millionth of a second.
